To Die, To Sleep
by Flobbergasted
Summary: Annie and Mitchell learn to face the long nights together. (spanning Series 1 & 2, with minor spoilers)
1. Chapter 1

**Summary:** Annie and Mitchell learn to face the long nights together. (spanning Series 1 & 2, with minor spoilers)

**Disclaimer:** It's all yours, Toby.

* * *

Annie's nights alternatively dragged on or passed in the twinkling of an eye. Sometimes, on the long nights, she read books. Sometimes she mended the boys' clothes (torn during this fight or that beastly transformation). For a while, she tried to teach herself ghostly skills (shimmer, fade, alter her outfit in slight ways, move objects with more precision, etc). Then fancy napkin-folding. Sometimes she just played solitaire on George's phone.

George had always slept like a baby. Well, like a human. Well, an animal, anyway. He had always slept like a living thing: soundly, with mild, occasional turbulence. Annie could never bear to disturb such well deserved rest.

For herself, though, and for Mitchell, the night was an extra shift—overtime hours without the pay, without the support. Life quieted; gone was George's general tizzy of incredulity, and gone was the clarity of daylight, the buzz and buffer of lives being lived in the neighbourhood around them. For humans, it was precious quietude. For them… well.

Soon, Annie relapsed. That is to say, she took to making tea in the middle of the night. She had done it for a while—weeks? months?—before the boys had moved in, during her year alone. Now, again, she'd putter around, washing up, tidying this or that, rushing to the kettle as it steamed so as to stop the whistling before it woke any of the flatmates.

Occasionally, she got the feeling Mitchell could hear her. Was he just lying there, in his bed, half-asleep, listening to her putter? Did it comfort him? Did it annoy him? He never brought it up.

When Mitchell slept, he slept deeply, still and silent (as the grave, one could say…). When he didn't sleep, which also happened sometimes, he lived through the nights as though he stood at a precipice—fangs at the ready, pressing at his gums to come out—and he clenched his jaws and his fists against it. It wore at him, she knew, and she learned to sense when he was awake, fighting the inner battle—the energy around his room crackled somehow.

At first, she'd knock softly at his bedroom door, and they'd exchange status updates and pleasantries. "Are you okay?" "Yeah, fine." "Well, just call if you need anything." "Thanks. Goodnight, Annie."

Then, as their friendship deepened, she learned to read that energy, from outside, and she learned to guess (accurately) whether or not she would be welcomed on the other side of his door. She got into the practice, whenever it seemed a sure thing that he wanted company, of popping quietly in, bringing him a cup of tea and sitting underneath the window with a book while he tried to fall back to sleep. "You've come to dispel my demons, have you?" he'd say, with a sleepy, crooked smile.

Once or twice, she got a story out of him before he fell asleep. Usually memories about interesting places or people. He really did remember things in vivid detail. The strangest things—fabrics, shadows. Sometimes they just played Trivial Pursuit. Once, for nine hours straight. (Predictably, Annie was best at the pop culture questions, but Mitchell won the day in history and arts and literature.)

Occasionally Mitchell shared a memory—in a far-off voice, with a softer timber—about his human life, his original family, and Annie had to suppress the heartbreak and the endearment she felt. Rarely, but still occasionally, he'd tell a darker story, an unpleasant memory, a life lesson of his. For those, she sat against the bed—nearer to him than under the window, but still far enough away that he didn't feel intruded upon.

Still more rarely, when he had an insomniac night, they'd just chat. All night long. Whispers and giggles and sighs.

And so the nights became less terrible.

Annie began to live her new, ghostly life at night as well. It wasn't like before, when she felt—when she _was_—housebound. She began to wander the streets, getting to know the neighbourhood, and then the city, and then the countryside.

To be housebound, rattling her chains, was to be a proper ghost, but to walk the countryside was to be a _spectre_, a phantom. She wuthered in the heights. She rattled casements whenever she came across them.

Now and then, in the early morning, she shadowed the postman. Late at night, the bouncer at a local disco who made particularly entertaining quips when tossing unruly guests.

The nice thing was, at the end of her peregrinations, there was always _home_.

* * *

Once or twice, early on, when he must have felt a little guilty that he could sleep at all and she couldn't, Mitchell suggested that she try it. "Maybe it'd be good for you, havin' a little doze." She'd waved him off with a chuckle and kept reading.

Later, after she learned what had happened to her, and remembered the truth about her life, and her death—and how much more dangerous her un-life could be, and how dangerous George and Mitchell's lives already were—she felt something like what used to feel like fatigue. There were moments when she felt her whole self was sighing, like she was sinking into grey clouds—or the whole world was grey clouds, including herself—or she was being tossed about by the wind—or she _was _the wind. It was exhausting. In a way.

Maybe she just wanted to feel exhausted; maybe she felt she had the right.

Maybe she was worried that all her wuthering would eventually set her adrift on the proverbial moors.

That would be so… ghostly.

Maybe she was worried for what was left of her humanity.

So she decided to try it. Nap, that is.

It came down to this: one quiet night, while George slept off his transition (the wolf made him a very tired man), and Mitchell was out doing who knew what (and, probably, Who didn't want to know What), Annie slipped into his bedroom and laid herself down on the bed. There was no bed in her room, and she didn't think he'd be home anytime soon, nor would he probably mind that she preferred this to the living room couch as her test site (and even if he did, he could complain all he liked; it had been his idea in the first place).

It was comforting, to get into a bed, enfluffed in a blanket and a pillow, just like old times. And it was cosy to be still in the dull shine of moonlight, surrounded by the weighty absence of Mitchell, his now-familiar clothes, his flotsam and jetsam. … But it didn't feel like it was working. She watched the curtains sway lightly in the breeze. She looked for the craters in the moon. She perked up to George, who made a slight grunting noise from the other room, but forgot about it as soon as she deemed it innocuous.

Well, it had failed. Annie couldn't sleep. Back to reading it would have to be. … But maybe just another minute or two in the bed, for old time's sake. She sighed and pulled her knees closer up and her jammies tighter around herself as if she was cold (finally, she chuckled to herself, it was coming in handy that she had died in what were essentially her jammies). She looked at the clock. 1:43 AM. She sighed again.

* * *

It was moments like these, in which she was alone in some sense, when she couldn't help but recall the sorrow and anger of her first few months as a ghost. Those long nights of stillness and solitude before the boys had come.

What would happen as time wore on? As George aged? Would they move on? Would they leave her? How she would miss them. How she would moan and howl. How the house would creak and groan.

Would they miss her? If she could ever move on, that is. George would remember her, perhaps, but… would she be forgotten—another of a thousand faces—by Mitchell?

* * *

And then, what seemed like suddenly: "Budge over, sleepyhead." It was a quiet voice, a little gravelly. She could tell he was smiling even though she could only vaguely make out his form in the half-light.

She was up, then, and sitting. "My eyes were closed!" she marvelled, in a whisper, looking down at herself in befuddlment. Then she looked up to Mitchell, who was doing some puttering of his own, throwing off his jacket, taking his wallet and phone from his pocket and putting them down.

"How did you get in here?" she asked. (And how handy, as well, she reflected, that her hair was eternally done; if she took to napping, as it seemed she might have, she could cross bedhead from her list of worries.)

"Er, it _is _my room. In the house where I live, so…" He quirked an eyebrow at her as he sat down next to her on the bed.

"No, I mean, how did you get in here so suddenly? It's like you… rent-a-ghosted."

This time he grinned at her. "Annie, I got home at least fifteen minutes ago, and I pretty much came right upstairs, brushed the teeth, and then came in here. I was checking my phone messages for a full minute before I noticed you sleeping on the bed. Yes, _sleeping_. And _how cute _are you—" (he poked her and grinned wider) "—curled up in your little fetal position with your drapery wrapped all about."

Still marvelling at her newfound ability, she made room for Mitchell in his own bed, and they sat together, leaning against the wall at the head of the bed.

"How long were you out? Did you dream? Do you remember anything?"

"I don't know. What time is it? I don't think I dreamt anything. No, I didn't… I couldn't have been asleep for very long, if I was asleep… I don't even know for certain that I slept at all."

Mitchell turned the bedside clock slightly in her direction, lowered his head toward her, and raised his eyebrows triumphantly. 3:10 AM, the clock read.

She returned his gaze, with wide eyes, as she leaned back a bit. He leaned further and tugged lightly on one of her curls. "That's my girl, I knew you could do it."

And just as soon as he was all up in her space, she recalled that it was all really his space.

"Well… I'll… leave you to get to bed, then," she stuttered.

Annie began to shift away from him as he slid himself into a horizontal position. She shifted again, away from the middle of the bed, but Mitchell took the loose ends of her grey sweater in both hands, like reins, and tugged them toward him. Her forehead almost knocked against his as she lay down to face him.

"I'm knackered, Annie," he said with a great sigh, "and it seems like you are too. Just stay."

They were still lying on top of the sheets, sharing a pillow, but Mitchell pulled the blanket up over them both, and rubbed her arms—then stopped, as if he had just realized that he wasn't going to be able to warm her up, no matter what he did. But then he… nuzzled her. There was no other word for it. Forehead to forehead. Out of pity? Comradeship?

Was she blushing now? Could she even blush?

After a few quiet minutes, he spoke again. His voice wavered; Annie could tell he was drifting off. "I'm glad you slept. I mean I'm glad you know you can, now, if you want to."

"Thanks. Bit weird, but yeah."

Then, with his final burst of energy for the day: "should we get you a bed? If you're going to make a habit of sleeping, it's only fair."

"No." She snuggled closer. "No, it's fine."

* * *

Nice as it was to sleep next to someone (and it was _so_ nice—she had forgotten), the best part was waking up. Mitchell was still there, with his raspy "mornin'" and his adorable stretching, but the best part was that she had closed her eyes in darkness and opened them to streaming sunlight. She _basked_ in it. And it had been some time since she'd basked.

(Mitchell, on the other hand, she noticed, was very… squinty—until he rolled out of bed and pulled the curtains closed.)

"What woke you up?" he said, as he dove straight back onto the bed, lying on his stomach and scrunching the pillow up under his head.

"I don't know… maybe I just woke up because you did."

"I thought _I_ woke up because _you_ did. I felt a chill."

"Oh," said Annie, bristling a bit. She began to remove herself from the situation, standing up beside the bed.

"Nah, I didn't mean that in a bad way," said his muffled voice. He reached out for her without looking up from the pillow and made contact with her hip. Quickly he moved his hand up to grasp her elbow and pull her back down so she was sitting on the bed's edge. "I just meant… I don't know… I didn't mean anything by it."

She sat still for a moment, unsure of whether she should just leave the room. She picked lint from his blanket and tossed it to the floor.

"It was nice, Annie, don't fret about it. It was like—" he trailed off, and Annie recalled their accidental kiss—the same moment he was probably recalling. "Anyway, you're cold in a nice way. Seems like I've told you this at one time or another." (That last was said with his little quirk of the eyebrow.)

"You're cold too, you know," Annie said quietly. "At least, I think you are."

"Yeah, well, I _am _dead, so, I wouldn't put it past me." She could hear in his voice that he was smiling.

"Alright, well, lazybones," said Annie, ending the spell, "you're going to be late for work if you don't get cracking. I'll go put on the coffee."

This time, he groaned and rolled over.

She was already gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary: **Annie and Mitchell learn to face the long nights together. (spanning Series 1 & 2, with minor spoilers)

**Disclaimer:** It's all yours, Toby.

* * *

At night, without the hunt to distract and allay him, Mitchell's memories came back in full colour. Faces, places, feelings, over and over, around and around.

Worse still, though, were the nights when his thirst was strong, and his desire to hunt nearly overpowering.

His nights were, frankly, more _haunted_ than he cared to admit.

And now, irony of ironies, he had a ghost friend whose company seemed to alleviate it.

* * *

He had come home thirsty. Not thirsty. _Thirsty_.

He had tried to shield his eyes. Not for his sake but for hers.

She had put him straight to bed and plied him with thick coffee. Decaf, obviously, because it was after one in the morning. (In earlier days, before learning that he detested the stuff, it would have been chamomile.)

"You go… _into_ yourself when this happens," she was saying, though he could still hardly hear her over the pounding in his head. "You hide yourself away—but you don't need to. We're here for you. I'm here for you. We're… we're like your life support. I mean, we're all each other's life support."

What was the hour? It seemed quite late. Surely George was asleep. Annie was perched on the edge of his bed, facing him as he leaned against the headboard with his knees pulled up toward himself and his head in his hands. How long had they been sitting here in the dark? Was that coffee still around somewhere?

The pounding was subsiding now, finally. He looked up into her eyes. Lovely in the moonlight. Something in the darkness to focus on, shining.

She had taken his hands—when?—and now he unfurled his fingers and entwined theirs together. Something to hold on to. And he held on tightly—more tightly than he'd ever held Annie, he observed. He was squeezing now, and yet… and yet she seemed… well, fairly substantial. Moreso than usual. Or perhaps he just wasn't used to this kind of contact. And perhaps he was more sensitive than usual at the moment.

Was she talking? Yes, her mouth was moving, and the muscles in her neck… What a slender neck she had, under that mop of curls, and what an exquisite collarbone… Pity about the lack of pulse, though… no, _not_ a pity—a _relief_… Had she been talking for a while now? He hadn't been listening at all, but now the pounding was gone, and the talking began to register. A good sign.

"Break my fingers much?" Annie joked in a whisper, referring to their entwined hands—which Mitchell was still gripping. "…is what I would say if I was still alive, and could feel what you're doing right now." She chuckled, and then sighed again.

Now he snapped out of it for good, for the time being. His mouth felt dry, but somehow he formed words. His voiced creaked a bit. "Now, now. You can see me, and talk to me. I can see you. I see you. Okay? So no more wallowing."

"You're the one who's wallowing," she chuckled into his vest. "That's why I came in here in the first place."

"Oh, fine, we're both just big wallowers then. Typical vampiric activity. Typical ghostly activity too."

"It's really true, isn't it."

"Well. S'pose so. … In any case, thanks… for being here."

* * *

"Remember Tim?" Annie asked. She and Mitchell lay side-by-side on his bed, on their backs, looking up at the ceiling as though it was a starry sky.

"The baby? Yeah. But his name was Rufus."

"Right. Whatever. Anyway I'm just remembering him. His little white hat. How he liked scary stories." She sighed.

"You're a kook."

She shoved him a bit with her shoulder. "I'm not. I just… I s'pose I'm just thinking about what my life might have been, if I'd lived. Sometimes I think about that. I try not to, but it comes back to my mind. I can't help it."

"And you were thinking about kids."

She looked down at her hands and began to fiddle with the folds of her grey jumper. "Well."

"You would have been a great mother, you know."

"Aww, don't. You're just saying that."

"No, I'm not. Yeah, you want me to say it—" (and here he grinned at her just as she shot him a frown—charm always at the ready, like a shield) "—but it's still true. You would have been… warm. And, just, sweet."

"Oh, thanks for that _compli-sult_." She shoved him again.

A few more minutes of silence. Or maybe an hour.

"You would have been an adorable dad, Mitchell."

"What?"

"I can just picture you, with a couple of kids climbing all over you, and you're getting annoyed with them, but really you love it. I can just see them pulling on your hair and hiding your hat, and your keys. And you picking them up and slinging them over your shoulder."

"I hope these are four-year-olds you're imagining, because I don't think I could lift more than one pre-pubescent at a time. Two, max."

"Oh, they're definitely four. Maybe six, or eight. Rambunctious boys. I don't know why I'm picturing you with boys, but there you go. … And I think they love football, and Vin Diesel."

"You wanted boys, didn't you?"

"Yeah… How'd you know that?"

"I don't know, you said it once."

"Well. Yeah, I did want boys… Oh God, you're right. This dwelling stuff is bad. I feel like time… expands… when I wallow. It's the nearest thing to quicksand I'll ever experience, I think. Or a bottomless pit."

"I wouldn't have minded being a father."

"What? Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. You did take quite the shining to Bernie."'

"I mean, I never had time, obviously, and I don't think I ever had the right person, the right… teammate—" (he nudged her a bit—she was one of his life teammates, after all) "—for that sort of thing. But if I did, yeah—well, not worth thinking about, I guess."

"Of course it's worth thinking about. Anything that ties you to your humanity, your human self, is worth thinking about."

"Fine," Mitchell said, with the corner of a smile escaping his stern mouth, "you want to do this, let's do this. What I thought about kids, when I was a human, _if_ I ever thought about it, was that I'd _maybe_ make it out of the war, and that if I did, I'd go home to see my family, stay with my sisters and their husbands and wee ones for a while—will you listen to that accent coming straight back!—and they'd probably set me up with one of the girls from up the hill. We'd gone to church together as kids. What was their name? … Shaughnessy. The Shaughnessy girls. Red hair, the lot of them. So then I'd probably be doing the farming thing with me da' and me sons, a pack of rowdy gingers. Or girls. Maybe they'd've been girls. And maybe they'd've inherited this mess of black hair instead. Still farmers, though. Or maybe they'd've run away to the city. Or… actually, I haven't accounted for the other wars. So who's to say. It's all a bit moot, isn't it. Then after about fifty years of that, I'd die a proper death and they'd mourn me and put me in the ground where I belong."

Annie smiled a bittersweet smile. The whole thing seemed completely separate from the person she knew as Mitchell. She sighed and spoke.

"Well, you already know what I thought was in store. This house. George's room for a nursery. My room for the home office, so I could keep up with my design stuff. Owen off doing business-y things. Adorable kids watching 'The Sound of Music' on repeat in the living room. Two, maybe three of them."

"Well, they probably would've been just as adorable as you imagined, but you're well shot of Owen. I'm sorry you never got to have kids, truly, if you wanted them, but I'm very glad it didn't happen with that tosspot."

"Yeah." There she went again, clamming up and wringing her hands and her soft sweater.

"Oh, come here," Mitchell said, putting his arm around her shoulders and pressing his cheek to her hair. "No tears. No regrets. How did we let ourselves get so regretful? It's not good for us. Not to mention it's not good for the wiring in the house."

He paused, and she could feel him start to grin. "George's room for the nursery, you say? With all those gnomes and everything?"

"Hey, it's child-friendly. It inspires thoughts of fairy tales. Better than in here, with this… bizarro, early '90s deco thing happening," Annie laughed, waving at the wallpaper."

"You're a bit too high-and-mighty to be an 'angel in the house', you know. Though you are very good at the domesticity bit."

"Well you're a bit too… volatile for my taste, but we could have worked that out. Good to have a stable parent and a fun parent. Plus, I bet you weren't so up-and-down when you were human."

"Oh, 'up and down', am I? You're the one breaking the china and blowing the fuses! Anyway who said I would've wanted the angel in the house anyway. A warm, friendly face and a cup of strong coffee would do the trick."

Mitchell had been smiling at Annie, but he wavered momentarily. Something was beginning to go amiss in this conversation. He knew he meant what he was saying, and he appreciated the honesty and the banter, but… what? Something felt a little too close to home.

"I'd be happy just with someone who wasn't an abusive twat. … Someone strong, but still jolly."

"We're being regretful again. Let's cut that out, shall we? Look, the sun's starting to come up. Let's just…"

He trailed off, but he knew Annie was with him. With him here, but also with him on stopping short of that fuzzy line they'd just approached. How had that happened?

* * *

Annie always leaves fairly quickly in the morning, after sleeping in Mitchell's bed, as if she's embarrassed and/or purposefully trying to avoid doing what anyone (George, presumably) might see as… luxuriating… in bed… with Mitchell. Well, fair enough.

If she wanted a good, old-fashioned lie-in, it'd have to be on the couch.

Obviously, she has to leave his bed in the morning. He _gets_ that she has to leave. He _gets_ that the spell of nighttime ends, and the day has to start. It just, frankly, stinks.

It stinks because… of reasons that he prefers not to acknowledge or read into. (She's just so… _nice_.)

Mostly, though, it stinks because the moment she leaves, he's on his own, and the fight begins anew. Mitchell vs. himself, round… well, he'd lost count of the rounds.

It stinks because the safety net lifts.

Brand new day. Bloody hell.


End file.
